Cost Saving for Apple to Choose ARM over Intel i5/i7 for MacBooks

Intel charges around $120-140 for each i5/i7 chipset used in Apple’s MacBook portfolio. Intel generates a gross margin of over 60% on each of these chipsets. This contrasts with ARM based chipset costs of around $15-30, with a mid 40% gross margin. It is possible, therefore, that Apple is keen to reduce the price point of its MacBook portfolio by transitioning away from Intel. It may be that Apple does not believe that Intel’s roadmap aligns with its own requirements, resulting in Apple either having to use an under-powered chipset or overpay for a more capable one. We believe this missalignment in incentives between the companies will continue to push Apple to take more
control of its own hardware.

Intel does have a line of lower priced chipsets (the Clovertrail range) that is based on the x86 platform and is priced at around $40. We expect many of (more…)

Apple Product Roadmap – Power efficiency favors ARM over x86

ARM chipsets are more efficient than x86 when using equal geometries, making ARM chipset less reliant on smaller geometries to sustain efficiency improvements. ARM’s main weakness has been processing power, but this should be addressed by the move to 64 bit processing in late 2013 as shown in the ARM performance roadmap in the figure below. (more…)

TIBCO – Transition in Core Service Oriented Architecture

TIBCO is a leading provider of infrastructure and middleware software, with its origins in providing a real-time information bus or backbone that has enabled operations such as Wall Street trading floors to integrate systems and data to provide real-time flow of stock quotes and news items.

The company has significantly expanded its market opportunities by growing its stack of software technology to broaden the number of vertical markets that are addressed by the platform as well as adding layers of technology that enable it to expand beyond the IT department as the primary market to line-of-business managers who see the benefits for operational decision making.

As its traditional market has matured, management has shown good vision in repositioning the company to enhance growth and stay relevant in the (more…)

Japanese Telcos Encourage Customers to Migrate to 4G / LTE

The Japan telecom sector has continued to outperform over the past few months mainly because of 1) firm results driven by smartphone expansion, 2) declining concern about price wars as mobile operators encouraged their users to migrate to LTE with higher tariff offerings, and 3) the inflow of funds into domestic defensive stocks. In particular, Softbank and KDDI showed stronger share price performance due to good fundamentals and increasing expectations for iPhone5, which would accelerate their subscriber acquisition pace/market share gain.

LTE with higher tariff and more efficient network will be positive (more…)